Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Jean Bethke Elshtain

But evil will have its due, Bonhoeffer argues. It is our task to prevent it from having its day. With this Lasch would concur. Central to that task is a recognition of limits to human self-striving and self-overcoming. Shame is not "good in itself," Bonhoeffer insisted. Rather, shame "must give reluctant witness to its own fallen state." From its division, humankind covers itself. Man "without a limit, hating avidly passionate, does not show himself in his nakedness."(10) The human being hates this limit. He--and she--would overcome it. Rather than witness to our fallen state we are too easily seduced by arrogant anthropocentrism and by a totalist politics that promises a Garden beyond good and evil as its culminating point.

Both Bonhoeffer and Lasch insist that we enter the public sphere through a stance of rectitude rather than one of yearning for "the restoration of lost unity," in Bonhoeffer's powerful phrase. It is our recognition of this "in between"--a world in-between self-concealment and self-revelation--that permits us to engage the public world without being consumed by it. For should politics claim the totality of us, that is a claim based on a unity we have lost; it is a claim that promotes violent impositions, often in the name of progress. Transgressing the barrier of shame is a way to deify man and this is the route to nihilism. Bonhoeffer notes, and indicts, an "unrestrained vitalism" and it was precisely such a force Lasch detected in American worship at the altar of progress.

When those aware of the barrier of shame speak of "necessity" or "fate," they write out of sorrowful recognition. They recognize that human action is always fraught with peril and irony, always performed in a kind of "twilight." Small wonder that so many philosophers have wanted us to step out of the cave into the glaring, iridescent light where all is revealed and limits and shame are no more. But ethics or "the ethical" mark boundaries--boundaries of shame and shamelessness; boundaries of public and private; boundaries of intimacy and publicity. Political thought that respects such boundaries must, then, come to grips with limits in a way that a disrespectful barrier-overturning philosophy will not and cannot. It was Lasch's characteristic habit of mind to locate where the greatest dangers might be found and, in light of the vagaries of a time and place, to ponder what might be coming if we continued on our present course. In this way, he believed, we might acknowledge our fearfulness without falling into cowardice, and we could articulate hope without capitulating to false optimism.

Lasch recognized that no single school of thought or tradition offered a "panacea for all the ills that afflict the modern world." But a tradition worth mining helps us to ask "the right questions."(11) Such a tradition draws us away from "fantasies of omnipotence" into a more complex world. One strong characteristic of Lasch's work--and his work has become for us now part of a tradition to call upon as our own--is his incisive determination to make distinctions: to sift, divide, and separate. In other words, Lasch's work taken as a whole provides an exemplary instance of that faculty Hannah Arendt called the most important of all political faculties of the human mind: the ability to make judgements. As with shame, judging is in bad odor at present. We associate judging with "being judgmental," with not being nice to people and upsetting them and invading their "comfort zone," of all things. But minus judgement we are incapable of acting with resolve and purpose.